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Hacked Macron Emails Dumped on Eve of French Election
An election draws near, and thousands of campaign emails are dumped online. Sound familiar?
This time the victim is French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron whose En Marche! Movement was apparently hacked less than two days before French voters decide between him and Marine Le Pen. Nine gigabytes of data were posted anonymously to document-sharing site Pastebin. Macron’s campaign confirmed the breach:
“The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and co-ordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information,” the statement said.
An interior ministry official declined to comment, citing French rules which forbid any commentary liable to influence an election, and which took effect at midnight French time on Friday (2200 GMT).
That last bit creates a problem for Macron. According to French law, politicians, journalists, and even citizens, are forbidden from broadcasting any “electoral propaganda” for the last 44 hours before the election. This rule might have made sense in an age of newspapers, TV, and radio, but it’s much harder to police speech online and across borders.
Heading into the election, Macron is heavily favored. We’ll have to wait until the evening of May 7 to see what impact this last-minute document dump will have.
Published in Foreign Policy, Politics
“Journalist” Matthew Dalton at WSJ: “The diffusion of the rumor about Mr. Macron appeared to follow a playbook increasingly familiar to Western officials: A network of far-right activists using the internet to distribute unsubstantiated or false information about politicians opposed to their positions.”
So this information is fake and from the far-right or real and from the Russians?
One page of text ≈ 2K
9G of text ≈ 4,500,000 pages
This was dumped just before “lights out.” That might have been done to prevent detailed analysis prior to the election, to heap as much doubt on Macron as possible.
Y’all said Trump was Putin’s stooge, but Putin doesn’t seem very happy with him now.
Animal Farm 2017 – Some “unsubstantiated documents” are more equal than others.
How does that change the fact that prior to his election Putin used the FSB to undermine his opponent?
Fact? It has been alleged. The allegation came from Crowdstrike. Crowdstrike is the only organization that had access to the DNC’s servers. Crowdstrike was hired by the DNC. If the FBI has anything else at all, they’ve been surprisingly quiet about it.
This has absolutely no coherent basis in reality. Unless there is something remarkable in the classified reports.
The very idea of any kind of organized effort on the Right is hilarious.
Sticking you head in the sand is apparently what “conservatives” do now.
Average person? Absolutely. More power to them.
Socialist leaning politicians? hang em by their heels ala Il Duce.
[Redacted.]
I think “arrogance” suffices as an explanation. I was told the same thing -as a professor at a state college, as an employee of a city government, everything that I write can be subpoenaed or FOIA-ed. Write appropriately.
But we all know that such laws only apply to little people -they don’t apply to Clintons or Macrons. So they don’t behave that way. And then are shocked to find out that even the FBI can be guilted into sometimes doing its job.
Saying it doesn’t make evidence appear.
The evidence is there you just refuse to look at it.
You’re getting delusional here.